Faculty Profiles

Robin Elizabeth Haas (she/they) is a PhD Candidate specializing in early modern and Restoration British drama and performance. Their recent research combines book history and queer and trans studies approaches to analyze the period’s printed plays, and investigates the ways that anti-trans and anti-queer violence is dramatically linked to spaces such as the convent, the closet and dressing room, the writing desk, and even the runaway carriage.

Their dissertation project, titled "Trans Print & Performance in Early Modern British Theatre," examines the ways performance texts by Shakespeare, Milton, Jonson, Cavendish, Behn, and Congreve are represented and reproduced in print, especially in paratextual materials such as prefaces and dramatis personae, to illustrate how vital both the playhouse and the printshop are to our attempts to “do trans theatre history” in the early modern period. An article-length version of this project's first chapter, titled "The Tempest’s Trans Magic: Transition, Technology, & Futurity in Ariel Across Time," has been published in Comparative Drama (spring/summer 2026).